It’s Productivity Month on iPad.AppStorm! Throughout July, we plan to share with you all our tips, tricks, apps and resources to help you both improve your iPad experience and work better and more productively!

It happened again. Your meeting is in half an hour, you’re out of the office and you forgot to put together your presentation. Normally this would put anyone in quite the predicament, but not when you have an iPad with PublishME handy!

With lightning speed, your fingers fly across the screen using the app’s intuitive controls to create new slides with care. Text is written, media is placed and within minutes you’re feeling like the presentation pro. Feelings of misery and defeat have turned into relief and the satisfaction of a job well done! Crisis averted. So, how does PublishME fulfill its promise of presenting “on-the-go” made easy? Read on to find out.

It’s Productivity Month on iPad.AppStorm! Throughout July, we plan to share with you all our tips, tricks, apps and resources to help you both improve your iPad experience and work better and more productively!

One of the gems on the productivity app market is 30/30, and if you haven’t tried it out yet, now’s your shot. It’s got lots of great features and is quite a looker, too. A built in timer and plenty of customization options for all of your tasks are just the tip of the iceberg with this pick. I’ll run through all of the best features of 30/30 and what makes it such a task managing powerhouse. (more…)

It’s Productivity Month on iPad.AppStorm! Throughout July, we plan tshare with you all our tips, tricks, apps and resources to help you both improve your iPad experience and work better and more productively!

I think I can say with absolute certainty that there’s one type of app where iPad owners are app-solutely (sorry, terrible pun) spoilt for choice — and that’s note-taking apps. From Evernote to Simplenote, there are literally thousands of offerings out there on the App Store, all promising new ways for you to streamline your notes and make yourself more productive.

I guess I’m old-fashioned in the way I make notes: with my good old-fashioned Moleskine and a fountain pen. I’m not a dinosaur but I prefer handwritten notes and there’s something vaguely satisfying about opening up a notebook with loads of scribbled notes in it, complete with a load of vague diagrams and thoughts that made sense once upon a time. Normally, new note-taking apps don’t really grab my attention but given the amount of press and hype surrounding NoteSuite recently (it’s been featured on a score of different websites), I thought maybe this one could tempt me and coax me away from my old-fashioned technology?

If there’s one thing that the iPad doesn’t have a shortage of, it’s note taking apps. And if there’s one thing I can’t get enough of, it’s note taking apps. I’m always interested in trying out the latest and greatest. It’s becoming a serious problem, because I don’t need a new note taking app. In fact, every time a new one pops up, I shake my head. Even though I’ve got a workflow I really like already, I’m compelled to try it.

When I had the opportunity to take a look at Microsoft OneNote’s 2.0 update, I instantly remembered how much I enjoyed the desktop app about two years ago. This was an app that singlehandedly got me through most of my second and third years of university. So even though I’m satisfied with my workflow, I had to check it out. What if OneNote could disrupt what I’ve already got? Read on to find out if it lives up to the hype.

Here at iPad.AppStorm, we absolutely love iPad apps, from business ones to weather ones. We review all different kinds of app, but from now on we’d like to focus on a particular category of app every month, giving you the very best reviews, roundups, feature pieces and how-to guides on that particular kind of app.

For July, our theme will be productivity apps. We’ll be kicking off with a feature about Droplr and throughout the month, we’ll be bringing you great reviews, features and guides on how to be more productive with your iPad. All our posts will be marked with the tag productivity month, which you can follow by clicking here.

So fasten your seat-belts, get your iPad battery charged right up to 100%, and prepare your fingers. It’s going to be a fun ride!

Back at the start of this week, I reviewed Beesy, a professional note-taking and task management app for the iPad — and I loved it. The app received a 9 out of 10 rating, mostly due to its sheer range of features and its different take on iPad interfaces (everything is focused on hexagons).

Note-taking apps for the iPad come at a dime a dozen. From the more popular offerings such as Evernote and Simplenote to fairly obscure ones, there’s something out there on the App Store for almost every kind of iPad user. And now, with Beesy, from French developers BeesApps the business user is also covered as well. It’s received rave reviews from publications such as MacWorld and was recently featured as an Evernote Pick — a pretty astounding achievement, especially from such a massive and well-established company.

Beesy helps to make note-taking in the workplace a simple and painless task. At $5.99, it’s certainly priced towards the business end of the market so let’s find out whether or not Beesy is the note-taking app for professional use.

I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but we — humans, that is — often struggle to remember things. Hence, note-taking is an inherent part of any functional organizational workflow. It is little wonder, then, that numerous app developers have, over the years, attempted to ween us off the good old pen and paper, and move us over to a more technologically advanced method of thought tracking.

For a time, I was drawn in by some of these efforts. I flirted with the creative, freehand reminders which Paper makes possible. I came to the Evernote party relatively late, but I now use it every day to keep my digital life in order. As far as I’m concerned, however, it’s still the case that nothing beats the flexibility and ease of access a real-life notebook can offer. No matter how hard an app tries, it isn’t as visually available as a Post-it note, nor is any touchscreen as sensitive as a thin, bleached slice of tree. What’s more, typed text is ordered — our thoughts, generally, are not.

That is why I’m cautiously enthusiastic about Chisel. Designed to be the one and only digital note-taking app you’re ever going to need, it includes the ability to record your thoughts as text, drawings and annotations.

Can Chisel really strike a decisive blow for digital note-taking? Let the scribbling and typing commence.

Ideas. They make the world go round. The famous American architect and author, Frank Lloyd Wright, called ideas “salvation by imagination”, and a good idea can take you far by helping you get that promotion, make more money, or inspire others. The new app Gini is about raising the quality of ideas. According to the description it provides a methodology that provokes deeper thinking and creative engagement using a unique interface that maps the strengths and weaknesses of an idea.

As someone who is always interested in coming up with new ideas I decided to give Gini a try to see if it could really live up to that promise. Would it really help me discover new and better ideas? I was intrigued by the concept of an interface that maps ideas. Read on to see what I thought after using Gini.

This week’s weekly sponsor is PDF Max Pro, an advanced PDF reader with support for annotations, note-taking and form-filling.

I personally am not a fan of the default PDF reader on the iPad, Preview, as it’s simply a very watered down version of the Mac version, with almost every single useful feature stripped out. There’s no support for annotations and all you can do is read PDFs in it – there’s no iCloud sync (like in iWork on iOS) with your Mac and, unless you succumb to iBooks, you can’t store PDFs natively on your iPad. Hence, most iPad users turn to third-party PDF readers which provide far more features, often at a tiny price.

Read on to find out how to win 1 of 5 free promotional codes for PDF Max Pro!